line drawing of a bird. maybe a bluebird, if it weren't black and white.When Old English maxims appear in poetic usage, as opposed to collections, they frequently take the form of an indisputably true observation about nature, followed by a statement about the current situation, from which we are to infer an analogy that will guide the character’s choice. That sounded familiar, but it took me days to figure out what I was remembering. It was a song by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein from “Showboat“: 

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die.
Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine

line drawing of a shark. He looks happy. His teeth are not threatening at all.

Or, just maybe, it was Tom Lehrer. Either way, I love seeing thousand-year callbacks in popular culture.